1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a control apparatus, a control system, a control method for controlling a plurality of instruments, for instance, cameras connected to a network from a plurality of remote locations and to a storage medium for storing processing steps of the same thereby to perform control operations so that a computer can read the steps out of the medium.
2. Brief Description of the Related Art
There has been a system wherein a camera and a computer (a terminal station or a terminal console) are connected to each other through a remote spooling (referred to as “RS”) serial cable etc., thereby enabling to control camera such as panning, tilting, zooming etc. from the computer as well as to obtain and to set optical parameters such as a distance of an object to be sensed, exposure information etc.
In the system mentioned above, a software (namely, a processing program) for performing said camera control is preliminarily built-in in the computer. Performing the processing program by, for instance, a central processor unit (referred to as “CPU”) etc. turns the remote control of the camera from the computer capable.
In that status, if control commands for controlling the camera are input by means of user's manipulating such as a keyboard, a mouse etc. which are connected to the computer, the control commands are transferred to the camera. The camera drives being subjected to the control commands.
Beside this, there has been another system wherein a plurality of cameras and a plurality of computers are connected to a network, respectively, thereby enabling to control the plurality of cameras remotely from the plurality of computers similarly to the system as mentioned above.
Herein in the latter system, if the control commands are output from the plurality of computers simultaneously, for instance, to a certain camera, the control commands contradict to each other, which results in chaos of the camera operations. Accordingly, a concept “a control right” is introduced to prevent the chaos.
In the system wherein the plurality of computers can control the plurality of cameras as mentioned above, however, “the control rights” are allocated equally to the individual cameras. Consequently, if a certain computer simultaneously controls the plurality of cameras which are correlated with each other, the computer has to attain all of the control rights of the cameras that can be control targets.
Accordingly, the user should have performed up to now multiple manipulations on the computer to attain all of the control rights to control the cameras that can be the control targets of the computer, which is a very complicated operation for the user. Further on that occasion, as the user has to provide the computer with the control instructions for controlling the individual cameras after understanding all of the operations of the cameras that can be the control targets of the computer, there arises a problem that the user cannot concentrate his control operations on a certain camera.